As landfill space tightens up, and as towns look for ways to save money, many are turning to recycling.
For residents, recycling means we have to dump the bottle or can in the appropriate bin and call it a day.
But as NHPR correspondent Brian Early found out, there's another side of the recycling world.
A side where there's money to be made…And Manchester is going to be part of it.
(22 Secs) C'mon gentleman, where are we.
Where's Motville?
Next to it.
Yes.
Sell it there. 120 delivered. Get a freight rate on it first. .
It's a typical day for Patrick Corcoran of Corcoran Environmental Services.
A bottle manufacturer calls from New York and asks him to buy a truck load of slip sheets.
Slip sheets, in this case, are chipboard that are inserted into a case of bottled water to separate the layers of bottles.
(14 secs) The manufacturer has a trailer load of that product they need out of that plant. So what I need is a location is that facility is, and we'll just determine where they want to sell it. It's as simple as that.
Armed with a few sales people, Corcoran's company makes transactions nationally and internationally.
He has not facility yet to store the material, but it doesn't matter.
Within 10 minutes, Corcoran is able to find a home for waste that would have been destined for the land fill.
He hires a trucker.
(10 Secs) Talk to billy and tell him what it is. They are corrugated slip sheets, 44 thousand pound load
Corcoran lives and breathes recycling.
In his office in Manchester, he keeps an array of materials that he can keep out landfills.
He holds up a cap that contains three different grades of plastic.
(44 secs) This product comes from a five gallon water container that you have at your office or your house, and we were able to find a market for this particular customer to get them so revenue on the product. This one plant generates here in New England generates about five million of these caps, and they have seven plants around the country. To me, that really energizes me, I really enjoy part of this business, saving natural resources, saving landfills, and also cost of saving from having this be a one time use.
He also likes the money.
He did eight million dollars worth of sales in the past year.
And recently Corcoran Environmental Services signed a contract with Manchester…..a 50 year recycling contract.
Corcoran is going to build a MRF – that is, a Materials Recovery Facility, which is really a fancy name for a recycling center.
The facility will sit on city land near the landfill.
And it will be large enough to take in recyclable materials from not only Manchester, but from towns and cities within a 50 mile radius.
In fact the town of Hudson has just signed a contract with Corcoran to haul away its recyclables.
They'll go to the MRF when it's built.
Corcoran is designing the the MRF for a single stream.
That means residents can toss all their recyclable materials into one container.
It will get separated at the MRF, and Corcoran will then sell it.
Joanne McLaughlin heads the recycling program in Manchester.
(26 secs) Ten years ago, you almost had to pay to get rid of some of these material. These days, this stuff is actually worth money. That's what I'm trying to convince people of. That you're paying extra to throw this in the ground. We pay 65 dollars a ton to throw this material into the ground that is worth money. It has value. We might as well as be throwing dollar bills into the ground.
And Manchester plans on taking many of those dollar bills to the bank.
When the MRF opens, Corcoran will be paying the city to lease the land.
The company is also going to give the city a cut from the tonnage of recycling that is expected to arrive from other towns at the MRF.
When finished, the facility is expected to be one of the 20 largest in the country.
Builders plan to break ground later this year.
Operations are scheduled to begin in 2009.
For NHPR News in Manchester, I'm Brian Early.
Delicious
Digg
Reddit
Facebook
Google
Yahoo